Posts tagged: Turkey

This is already the tenth addition to the Thesis Piecesseries made up of contributions from my past and present PhD research students at the University of Nottingham. This blog post from Görkem Altınörsspotlights some of the key misunderstandings about the Gezi Movement in Istanbul and focuses on the social processes linked to how shopping malls in Turkey have become what he calls the “spatial incarnations of neoliberal order” in Turkey.

Kapitalizm gölgesini satamadığı ağacı keser

(Capitalism will cut down the tree if it can’t sell its shadow)

— Graffiti around Taksim Square

The greatest civil uprising in recent Turkish history erupted in Istanbul on 31 May 2013. It started with a peaceful sit-in protest in order to protect a few (probably the last) trees in the city centre. The excessive usage of force by police against activists assisted protests in spreading first across Istanbul and then to almost all cities throughout Turkey as well as major cities around the world. Demonstrations took an inspiring, widely participated, and multi-located form which created its own humour via graffiti and social media. According to government resources 2.5 million people joined rallies across the Turkey. The Turkish Medical Association has declared 4 deaths and over 8,000 injuries (60 with serious conditions). More than 70 people have been detained (out of 4,900 arrests) within 20 days.

We deplore the recent crackdown of the Turkish government on its own citizens, the clearly unjustified use of tear gas, acts of force, gas canisters and smoke bombs that have resulted in a vast number of injuries, imperiling the lives of those who seek to exercise their basic freedoms of assembly and protest. This assault of the Turkish government on its own people constitutes an attack on democratic principles and a departure from legitimate methods of governance — we unequivocally oppose such tactics of intimidation and state violence. In the name of democratic principles, we call upon the Turkish government to cease these violent actions immediately. We affirm the aims of the popular resistance to the privatisation of public space, to the growing authoritarian rule dramatically instantiated by this objectionable display of state violence, and the preservation of public rights of protest. We call upon the government to (a) stop the beating of all protesters and those in the media who seek to represent their point of view, including lawyers and journalists; (b) cease obstructing access to medical care for the injured; (c) put an end to the practice of unlawful detention and sequestering of protesters, medical personnel and legal counsel and (d) facilitate access to medical care and legal representation for those injured by the police. We call for the immediate end to this appalling state violence and we reaffirm the rights of popular dissent and resistance, the right to have access to a media uncensored by governmental powers, and the right to move and speak freely in public space as preconditions of democratic life.

The seesaw of uneven development in Turkey under neoliberal restructuring has led to unprecedented recent growth. After a sharp contraction in 2009, the economy has been in the top three of the G20 club for rapid growth, the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2010 was 8.9 percent, nominal wage growth has hit 18 percent a year, domestic demand is rising by approximately 25 percent, and credit growth is between 30 percent and 40 percent. Perhaps in order to absorb the surplus value that capitalism perpetually produces in the search for ever more profit, urbanisation and public works projects in Turkey have continued at a rapid pace. But can the rise and rise of neoliberalism in Turkey be adequately understood through a focus on the hegemony of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP)?

This is the ninth addition to the Thesis Piecesseries made up of contributions from my past and present PhD research students. This blog post from Cemal Burak Tansel raises awareness of what he calls the ongoing “double enactment” of surplus absorption and the closure of public spaces in Istanbul under the increasingly authoritarian form of neoliberalism unfolding in Turkey. The occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul is the latest in a series of attempts to confront the authoritarian neoliberalism of the AKP.

On May 28 an impromptu occupation began in Istanbul’s central Gezi Park following the news that the metropolitan municipality had sent bulldozers to demolish the park. The park was doomed as it sits on the pathway of a new urban restructuring programme which included the transformation of the green zone into another superfluous shopping complex. Largely ignored by the outlets of the corporate press, the news travelled quickly on social media, followed by the appearance of a number of protesters at the scene. Four days since the initial mobilisation, Gezi Park has witnessed a continuous influx of protestors who have organised sit-ins and public talks in a largely carnivalesque atmosphere. On May 30, Al Jazeera reported that ‘unconfirmed reports suggest more than 10,000 people are currently gathered in Taksim’s Gezi Park’. But the increasing number of bodies gathered at the location could not make a dent in the AKP government’s commitment to ‘urban renewal’. On the contrary, the government responded to this unexpected public resistance by repeating a time-honoured act of histrionics in Turkish politics: ignore the public, if that does not work, terrorise them.

This is the third contribution in the series Thesis Piecesfeatured on For the Desk Drawer written by my past and present doctoral students. This contribution from Ertan Erol focuses on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of autogestion, related to forms of struggle for spaces of difference, alongside the expansion of capitalist space in Mexico and Turkey.

In my recently completed PhD (2012), I focused on particular processes of neoliberal re-territorialisation and peripheral capitalist spatiality. Specifically, I analysed the intensification and expansion of capitalist space in Mexico and Turkey in the form of regional integration projects. In that sense, Mexico’s major regional integration project known as Plan Puebla Panamá/Proyecto Mesoamérica and Turkey’s major regional economic development efforts in the Black Sea and Trans Caucasus areas were located and analysed within the wider processes of neoliberal restructuring in the periphery. It is important to recognise, though, that these neoliberal re-territorialisations are complex and dialectical processes that unfold on different social scales and include various social actors resisting on different levels and across different socio-spatial forms. Hence, in a focus on the regional expansion of neoliberal re-territorialisation in the periphery attention must also be cast towards the main social responses and forms of resistance offering alternative projects to neoliberal restructuring.